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Monday, December 15, 2014

By Patricia McBroom“Picture
a pasture open to all,” where each herdsman strives to keep as many
cattle as possible on the commons, an economist wrote almost 50 years
ago. The rational choice for each individual is to add more animals
to his herd without regard for the welfare of neighbors, and they all
do that as they march inexorably toward mutual destruction – the
“Tragedy of the Commons” as described by Garrett Hardin.

“Each
man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd
without limit – in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination
toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a
society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a
commons brings ruin to all,” Hardin wrote in Science Magazine in 1968.

Groundwater Commons

By
far, the largest, most important commons in California is the water
beneath our feet, and it is well on its way toward ruin. Large
basins beneath the valley floors contain up to ten times the capacity
of all the state's reservoirs put together (42 million acre feet).
They are uncharted and boundless, subterranean streams of water
flowing among the rocks in mysterious, unexpected ways from one
region to another. And they are shrinking.

In
these years of drought, a giant sucking sound could be heard
throughout the Central Valley as farmers pumped ever more water from
the rocks beneath the earth. The deeper the drill, the more ancient the layers. As they pumped, the land sank, along
with the water table. In some areas of the San Joaquin Valley, only
the biggest, wealthiest farmers could go deep enough to reach the
water, and they did, leaving their neighbors literally in the dust
with dry wells. Surface land in portions of the San Joaquin Valley
sank by up to ten inches in just six months of this year, from May to
October.

100 years of Exploitation

Californians
have been exploiting this commons for 100 years with precious few
restrictions. There has been no statute governing its use. The only
law that even affects groundwater pumping has come through case law
when a property owner sued another for infringing on his rights. In
these rare instances, judges have ruled that a property owner's right
to pump water from the ground is not unlimited.
Neighbors have rights as well – called correlative rights – and
any one property owner can only take his fair share of the safe
yield. But aside from this case law – of which the particulars are
hard to determine (what is “safe yield” from an uncharted basin?)
– the state has never imposed any limits on groundwater pumping.

That
is now changing.

First Statute to Govern Commons

Next
month, in January, the first written law governing this commons will
go into effect, a statute requiring local groups to create
sustainability agencies that will be charged with bringing depleted
groundwater reservoirs into balance. If locals don't do it within
the next few years, the state's water board has been empowered to
come in and correct the balance. This is the first time in
California's history that state authorities (other than courts) have given themselves the
power to stop a property owner from taking water from beneath his
land. But it will be a while before such power comes into play.

The
first opportunity to restrict pumping will be
January of 2020, the deadline for passage of a local sustainability
plan, said David Orth, manager of the Kings River Conservation
District in the San Joaquin Valley and member of the powerful
California Water Commission which will be making decisions on surface
and groundwater storage with new state bond money approved by voters
this year.

King's County's Dave Orth surveying a
recharge pond

“A
lot of things can happen in five years and that concerns me.... but
this problem doesn't lend itself to a quick fix,”said Orth. “Any
attempt tomorrow to restrict groundwater use, or even to set fees is
likely to lead to a legal challenge. We have to be patient and
recognize that it took 100 years to get here. It will take at least
20 to get out of it.”

Counties Stepping Up

Meanwhile,
county supervisors in the San Joaquin Valley are stepping into the
breach to find various ways to halt the overdraft in their local
groundwater basins. It's an urgent issue in counties like Merced,
Stanislaus, Madera and Kern where lands are sinking and wells are
running dry. Farmers are split, some opposing any restrictions;
others calling for a moratorium on extraction.

“Before,
farmers were united against doing anything,” said Sarge Green, a
program director from the California Water Institute at Fresno State,
who is helping counties write groundwater ordinances. “Now they are
being damaged by each other, and it has created a powerful incentive
to do something. You have farmers saying, 'I don't want my neighbor
to export water to another county or build a giant well that dries up
mine'.”

The
issues are so contentious that a groundwater lawsuit in San Luis
Obispo County had to be moved to Santa Clara County last month
because no one was neutral in the county of origin. San Luis Obispo
supervisors had passed a moratorium last year on new well drilling
from the Paso Robles groundwater basin and the county is now being
sued by 35 plaintiffs. They argue that no official can restrict their
right to pump whatever they need.

Local Variability

Elsewhere,
Madera and Kern counties both considered a moratorium on pumping and
rejected the idea. On the other side of the issue, Stanislaus County
passed an ordinance restricting people from certain unincorporated
areas from extracting water without a permit, while Merced County is
considering a similar ordinance that would also restrict export of
water from the county.

Merced
supervisor Diedre Kelsey said she became aware of the need for county
action when she discovered that two individuals from her district
were trying to pump local groundwater and sell it to buyers in
another county. “We may need an immediate moratorium,” she said.

The
issues are complicated.

Agony and Creativity in Reaching for Sustainability

In
Kings county, Orth and others are striving to create a sustainability
plan, bringing farmers together to expand land devoted to recharge
basins – areas where water can sit for several weeks to soak into
the aquifer below. They have even tried flooding grape fields with
18 inches of water for two months during the dormant season. In that
case, they came out ahead of the game with a bumper harvest. They're
now looking at how long they can leave water standing in an orchard,
anything to build the recharge capacity of an area where agriculture
is outrunning available water.

Orth
estimates that the Kings area is farming about five percent more land
than can be sustained with current water supplies. “Our strategy
is to make every bit of that up with flood water (recharge) and
voluntary water conservation to avoid land retirement,”he said, adding that the state as a
whole is over-farming by a significant amount and will have to retire
some agricultural land, if it cannot replenish the underground
aquifers.

“That's
the word that everyone is trying to avoid,” said Juliet
Christian-Smith, climate scientist with the Union of Concerned
Scientists. “Everybody is bending over backwards to not have that
conversation (about land retirement) right now,” said Christian-Smith. Instead they are talking about moratoriums and ordinances,
data and analysis:

“
'How much groundwater are we using? How much is being replenished
naturally? What do we need to do to reach the level of sustainable
yield? What does proportional reduction look like? Should we buy
out landowners?' They have to figure out what has gone on so far.”
said Christian-Smith.

Can
Californians learn to cooperate in this commons and not take more
than their “fair share” of a “safe yield”? It's a good
question. Some people may cooperate voluntarily; others will no
doubt need the police powers of the state and counties before they
stop taking their lion's share of precious water.

Monday, July 7, 2014

By Patricia McBroom There
is no fresh water flowing out of the Delta on this early July day in
summer and hasn't been since May, new data is showing. The only
water surging in and out are the salty tides, which continually
threaten fish and fresh water pumps serving people throughout the
state.

This
is the apparent condition of the Delta, according to state-of-the-art
flow monitors operated by the USGS in four locations near Rio Vista
and Brannon State Park (among others), where fresh water meets salty
and becomes brackish.

Official estimates of outflow, however, calculate that about 4,000 cubic feet per second (cfs) of fresh water is flowing into the Bay –
admittedly low, but not zero, which would have important implications
for managing water in this drought. State-generated outflow estimates
are not based on the above USGS monitors, though it has been obvious
for at least a year that there is a significant difference in dry
years between the two methods of calculating flow.

Small Differences Matter During Drought

In
wetter years, a small disparity such as 3,000-4,000 cfs would not
amount to much. This year is different. Drought is taking a huge
toll in both northern and southern parts of the state. In the
usually wet north, streams and rivers are near dry. The meager
snowpack in the northern Sierras hit its runoff peak in April, not
July, as usual. Ground water tables are sinking, not just in the San
Joaquin Valley, but in some northern counties as well. Farmers
throughout the state with junior rights have been ordered to stop
diverting water for their thirsty crops.

Under
these conditions, sales of water from north to south – normal at
this time of year –become problematic, even when the sellers are
willing. And the condition of the Delta, through which the transfer
waters must flow, is critical.

Suits Aims to Stop Transfers

Hoping
to stop water transfers of 175,000 acre feet, approved by the U.S.
Bureau of Reclamation this spring, two environmental organizations have filed suit in federal court. They requested an expedited hearing to halt the transfers that are scheduled to begin this month. Plaintiffs charge that the Bureau did not do
a proper environmental analysis before approving the transfers, and
the flow monitors maintained by the USGS in the Delta are
poised to play a staring role in the case.

“Their
totals (measuring delta outflow) have been near zero since May,”
said Thomas Cannon, a biostatistician whose work is cited in the lawsuit by the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance and
AquAlliance. I've never seen it this salty up here,” said Cannon
on a recent day in the Delta, waving his arm toward the docks at
Brannon State Park. Based
on his analysis, the suit charges that the dayflow method used by
State and Federal water officials “grossly overestimates actual
Delta outflow” during dry years.

If
the outflow is truly as low as the USGS monitors indicate, it means
that salt water is constantly threatening to move up the estuary and
that a number of fish species, including the iconic longfin and delta
smelt, are at risk of being carried into the export pumps which carry
water to the south of the State.

Accuracy of USGS Monitors Challenged

Difference,
however, does not establish worth. The man in charge of water
operations for the State Water Project in California's Department of
Water Resources, John Lehigh, challenges the idea that USGS monitors
are more accurate than state estimates. “I have seen no evidence that would lead me to conclude that this
estimate of outflow (using USGS monitors) is more accurate than the
one used now.” said Lehigh. He added that if someone thinks he has
a better way to measure outflow, that person should bring the issue
to the attention of the State Water Board. So far, no one has done
that, he said.

Lehigh
also questioned whether the monitors located in the lower Delta,
closer to the Bay, can truly detect outflow in the presence of tidal
flux. Outflow in drought conditions (3,000 cfs, for example) is
miniscule compared to the huge tides (150,000 cfs or more) that
daily wash in and out of the lower delta.

Science panel Validates New Outflow Estimates

Apparently,
USGS scientists have been able to account for the tides, because a report to the Delta Science Program in February demonstrated that
last year's salinity levels in the Delta matched the USGS outflow
meters. Not so the estimates used by the state (called NDOI for Net
Delta Outflow Index), which judged outflow to be more than twice as
high as the USGS monitors in the fall of 2013. “The NDOI estimates appeared to be clearly incorrect,” said the science program's final report (page 15) released in May. The report went on to say that Delta outflow did not meet minimum standards last year and questioned why the better outflow measures are not being used now. For this blog, a member of the expert outflow science panel, retired USGS engineer Pete Smith, calculated the difference between the two measurements for May and June this year (see graph).

By official estimates, fresh water outflow from the Delta is about 4,000 cfs; USGS monitors show that outflow to the
Bay vacillated between minus 6,000 cfs and plus 6,000 but the average for May and June was close to zero.Graph by Pete Smith

The same disparity that was evident in 2013 showed up again this year. NDOI estimates were way higher than outflow as measured by USGS monitors. Whereas California officials believe outflow in the Delta is around 4,000 cfs this summer, the actual figure measured where the Delta meets the Bay is about zero. In light of these findings, the State Water Board will be looking at "possible changes in determining outflow," said SWRCB engineer Rick Satkowski.

Delta Smelt Not in Normal Habitat

So
what does this complicated science all mean?

One
possibility is that famous Delta fish species – the delta smelt and
longfin smelt– could go extinct this year. Smelt follow a salt
line called the X2 because they prefer brackish water. Normally the
smelt are in Suisun Bay by the end of June, but this year they seem
to be still swimming around in the central Delta, near Brannon. In
addition to using possibly inaccurate measures of outflow (thus not
releasing sufficient water from the reservoirs), the State has also
relaxed its salinity standards this summer, bringing the X2 boundary
further upstream. This means the precious few smelt that are left
after years of decline are now directly in line of the pumps that
take water south.

“This
year, the only delta smelt anyone's been able to find are in the
Delta,” said Michael Jackson, an environmental lawyer who has filed
public trust suits against the State in past years, but is not
involved in this one.

Four USGS stations monitor outflow where Delta water enters the Bay;
official outflow monitors are located further upstream toward Sacramento
and where rivers enter the Delta.

“Because
there is no outflow, the only flow will be toward the pumps. Since
transport goes right through the area where the last smelt are, it
seems like we have put a tremendous amount of money and pain into
preserving the fish, only to end up exterminating the species this
year.” Jackson said there is nothing in the Bureau of Reclamation's environmental report on water transfers that recognizes the threat to
delta smelt.

Northern Communities also at Risk

Nor
is there anything that recognizes the danger to communities, farms or
ecology in California's north, said Barbara Vlamis of AquAlliance, one of the
plaintiffs. She said that the Bureau has simply asserted that no
environmental harm will be done to northern areas selling the water,
calling the assessment a “cheap and shoddy version of NEPA”
(National Environmental Policy Act).

“Why
are we selling water out of the north when the area will be rationing
this summer? By percentage of normal precipitation, the north has
been hit harder this year than the south,” said Vlamis.

(Bureau
officials have been making “temporary” one-time transfer
decisions for years, thereby obviating the need for a full-scale
environmental analysis on any one of them. The environmental suit is
challenging this practice.)

Salt Levels Due to Affect Pumps

Another
thing zero flow means is that salt contamination of pumps that bring
water to people in Contra Costa County, as well as southern parts of
the State, will climb throughout the dry summer months. When salt
rises too high, however, the Contra Costa Water District can dilute
it with fresh water from Los Vaqueros Reservoir, so there is no
imminent threat to urban areas. Too much salty water in the southern Delta
could, however, stop the water transfers regardless of the outcome of
the pending legal case.

Who
gets the water – if it goes through – is unknown. Buyers and
sellers are anonymous until contracts are written. But if history
and rumor are any guides, most of the water is destined to reach
Westlands, the wealthy corporate farmers in Kern County, known far
and wide for their political muscle in bending state and Federal
policies to their private needs. And that's a shame. It is bad
enough that these toxic lands, which release selenium into the
waterways, get watered in wet years. It's a travesty when they get
to use water during a drought like this – water that is critically
needed to save the ecosystem and hold the salt at bay for the rest of
us.

Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Down
the spine of California's Sierra Nevada mountains south of Yosemite,
huge granite peaks stand shoulder to shoulder more than 13,000 feet
high, with no passage through them. Only hikers can cross the rugged
range for more than 200 miles.

Banner Peak and Thousand Island Lakes mark the headwaters of the San Joaquin
River in the Ansel Adams Wilderness. Photo by Alex Breitler

These
tall mountains – the Southern Sierras – extending from the San
Joaquin River watershed east of Fresno to the southern edge of
Sequoia National Forest, epitomize California's erratic water supply.
In wet years, so much water pours down the mountains that its volume
would scare the daylights out of any creature without wings. In
drought years, meager streams cannot fill the
reservoirs.

A Year Like No Other

“This
year, no one has water” said Mario Santoyo, assistant general
manager of Friant Water Authority near Fresno, a unit of the Federal
Central Valley Project that provides irrigation for 15,000 farmers in
eastern San Joaquin Valley. “The public has no idea how bad this is
going to be....there will be nothing,” said Santoyo glumly. Friant
Dam distributes water to more than a million acres of fertile fields
that lie mostly east of highway 99, from Madera to Kern County. The
area produces more crops per volume than any other in the nation.

Behind
the dam, Millerton reservoir was dangerously low as of Feb. 7, and
Friant's managers were scouring the state to find more water. We
were on a boat on Millerton, touring the site of a proposed new dam,
Temperance Flat, that could rise at the back end of the lake,
more than doubling storage in the reservoir. (Because of its position in low
hills, Friant Dam cannot be raised).

A Dam You Love or Hate

The proposed dam at Temperance Flat (red) would hold 1.2 million acre
feet of water, extending another 16 miles up the river behind the current
Friant dam (in gray and pictured at top) Credit: Patricia McBroom

Temperance
Flat is one of the most controversial storage projects in California.
Farmers want it; environmentalists oppose it; Federal officials have
left it on the shelf for years. But this year, in the wake of
California's epic drought year, the project is alive and well. Like
nothing else, these months with no precipitation have driven home the
awareness that California does not have enough water in storage to
get through really bad dry periods.

Friant
farmers are particularly vulnerable this year, which helps explain why President
Obama is coming to Fresno on Friday, along with Senators Dianne
Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, who introduced drought-fighting
legislation in Congress this week. The Senate bill counters a bill
passed in the House by Republicans last week that would roll back the
historic San Joaquin River restoration project, among other
ill-considered features.

A
bit of background is needed to understand the stakes involved here
and in the state at large. Nowhere do the competing forces of
agriculture and ecology seem more tightly balanced than on the San
Joaquin River at Friant.

Bright Dream; Original Sin

Seventy
years ago, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation built this dam as the
centerpiece of a hydraulic revolution in the San Joaquin Valley. By
capturing the unpredictable waters of the San Joaquin watershed,
Friant dam and its associated canals gave rise to an agricultural
cornucopia, the pride of California and a major source of the
nation's produce. Unfortunately, it also brought about one of the
most painful chapters in California's water history, a history
already full of painful chapters. The story is told in a moving
account, The San Joaquin: A River Betrayed, by former
McClatchy reporter Gene Rose.

The Federal Central Valley Project in Fresno created two separate rivers.

In
laying the concrete for this farming miracle, engineers completely
reversed the flow of the San Joaquin River. They sent its waters
moving south to Kern County instead of north to the Delta. The river
that inspired John Muir disappeared within months. Salmon runs
abruptly ended. Landowners along the course of the northern-bound
river lost their water, among other deleterious effects.

Today,
the historic San Joaquin River disappears about 40 miles down from
the dam, leaving a 60 mile stretch of nothing but dry sand. What ends
up in the Delta, although called the “San Joaquin River”, is
recreated every year out of mostly agricultural runoff that rotates
repeatedly through the state water system. Its water comes with a bad
mix of pesticides and tons of salt, including dangerous levels of
selenium. Because it salts up the land, the recreated San Joaquin
River threatens the survival of the agricultural marvel Friant Dam
helped to inspire.

An Historic Win for the Ecology

A stretch of the once magnificent San Joaquin River, has
been dry for 70 years. With restoration releases, it shows
a meager stream of new water. Bureau of Reclamation

In
one of the longest running legal cases of its kind, the Natural Resources Defense Council won a settlement seven years ago that forces the Friant Authority to
release enough water into the old channel to restore the river and
restart the salmon run. Environmentalists don't want any more water –
not even flood waters – to be held behind any dam on the San
Joaquin River. Besides, they claim, farmers already take up to 95
percent of the watershed's precipitation. Do they have to have
the last .05 percent? Can't they let even one drop reach the
ocean?

Ronald
Stork, policy director at Friends of the River, which helped win the
restoration case in 2007 calls Temperance Flat a “dead beat dam.”
He said there isn't enough yield from a new dam, over what is
already taken, to justify its cost of about $3 billion. And, he
added, that extra water will hardly make a dent in what farmers are
currently pumping, leading to depletion of the aquifer, so its value
in recharging ground water is limited.

The Case for Farmers

Santoyo
strongly counters such arguments. Flipping charts to show that
flooding dramatically increased in the second half of the 20th
century, Santoyo illustrated how much water is lost to agriculture.
In 16 out of 35 years, from 1978 to 2013, Friant released water it
could not store because Millerton is too small. In each of eight of
those 16 years, more than 1 million acre feet were released –
enough to irrigate Friant lands for about a year. Most of the flood
releases went downstream into the old San Joaquin riverbed and
eventually reached the Delta. But sometimes the water went
everywhere.

Friant's Mario Santoyo: "I couldn't
move the water."

In
1997 (the year that Yosemite Valley flooded), a rain-driven cascade of
water came down the San Joaquin canyons that stunned Santoyo. It
came so fast and in such volume (120,000 cubic feet per second) that
no mere dam could hold it, certainly not Friant. It was like a
football stadium full of water plunging into the reservoir every
second, he said.

Reclamation
officials urgently called Santoyo: 'Can you move the water!?' they asked. “I couldn't,” he said. “There was no way I could
move that much water through our canals.” The water simply flowed
over the dam and down into the valley. “We needed a (bigger)
reservoir to hold it back,” said Santoyo.

A Challenged Dam in an Era of Climate Change

Environmentalists
argue that a flood like the one in '97 does not occur often, and
that's true. But climate change science predicts increased flooding
from rain in the Southern Sierras. And Friant is not built to handle
incredibly fast, big floods that happen over a few days, as they do
in a “pineapple express” or “atmospheric river,” as these
warm rains are called.

Chart shows higher peak flows in the San Joaquin during 20th century,
from 1905 to 2005. Photo from the Friant Water Authority

Unlike
other reservoirs in the central/southern Sierras, like the two
million acre feet Don Pedro Lake to the north, or the one million
acre feet Pine Flat reservoir to the south, Millerton holds only
500,000. It works more like a diversion basin than a reservoir, in
that it channels water immediately into the Friant-Kern and Madera
canals. By this means, it sends most of the water –1.8 million
acre feet – that comes down the mountains onto the fields.

Who Gets the High Water?

But
if Friant clients use most of the San Joaquin River water now, why
put themselves into big debt building another dam? At most,
Temperance Flat would increase their yield by 150,000 to 250,000 acre
feet per year – not overly impressive. (Formal predictions on
actual yield have yet to be released in feasibility studies.) One
answer is that farmers are eager to store flood waters for use during
dry periods and Temperance Flat would give them that flexibility.

“We
want to get back to a healthy river,” said Kathryn Phillips,
director of the Sierra Club California. She said the river needs more
flow than the amounts contributed by the restoration agreement with
Friant. “If you want groundwater recharge along the river, if you
want a balanced ecosystem, then you have to let the river flow.
Temperance Flat will not help that; it will harm it.”

Will the Salmon Run?

Water
policy officials like Randy Fiorini, chair of the Delta Stewardship
Council, have reached the opposite conclusion. Charged with the
responsibility of striking a balance between water deliveries to
humans and protection of the ecosystem, Fiorini said he thinks the
reservoir at Friant Dam is too small.

“I've
always been one to believe that if the upper San Joaquin is to be
successfully restored, the Fresno reservoir needs another million
acre feet of storage.” Only then, he said, can the state meet its
co-equal goals on the east side: to provide both irrigation water in
dry years and in-stream flows for fish.

Santoyo
hopes other Californians will agree with that point of view and
support a state bond in 2014 that he expects will allocate money for studies at
Temperance Flat. Aside from a drought, the one thing that scares
Friant people most is being hauled back into court, losing more water because the salmon don't run. And they won't run if the water
isn't cold enough. Millerton is a small, often warm lake, said
Santoyo.

“We
just don't have the volume of cold water we need to restore the
salmon. It's a high priority for us. We have to succeed in
bringing back the salmon.”

About Me

Journalist/anthropologist; author of two books, former science and magazine writer with the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Published "The Third Sex," on women adapting to formerly all-male career roles in the financial districts of New York and San Francisco in 1986 with wide reviews.
As professor, taught courses on women and work at UC Berkeley, Mills College, Rutgers University and Diablo Valley College. Affiliated with the California Studies Association at UC Berkeley.